Party Government and the Contract With America

Extract

American voters issued mixed signals in November 1994 about the preferred role of party in the nation's governing structures. Accordingly, those political scientists who advocate party government for the United States—disciplined parties committed to coherent governing programs consciously patterned on the parliamentary model—were left to debate whether the midterm election results were a glass half empty or half full.

The bad news for advocates of a “more responsible two party system” was that the voters rejected at their earliest opportunity the necessary precondition for party government in the United States: single party control of the nation's elected institutions (Committee on Political Parties 1950). By turning Congress over to the Republicans, the electorate terminated an experiment in which the entirety of the elected federal policy-making structure had been entrusted to the Democrats. That exercise of single party control was brief—and increasingly rare. In the half century since the end of World War II, one party has held the White House and both chambers of Congress just 21 years. In the last quarter century only Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have presided under these conditions. American voters, then, apparently returned in 1994 to comfortable form in restoring divided government, commensurately discomforting those who see in parties the remedy for a host of ills associated with separated institutions sharing powers.

Yet there were also promising developments in 1994 for party government advocates. At the top of the plus side of the ledger was the way in which House Republicans shed their status as a “permanent minority.”